


Feels Like Fire

by quondam



Category: Mass Effect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-30
Updated: 2017-01-30
Packaged: 2018-09-20 20:48:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9514496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quondam/pseuds/quondam
Summary: Though she never expected to survive what happened on the Citadel, Shepard wakes on Earth to news that the Normandy has vanished without a trace. On her own, she gets to work.





	

Surviving, as it turned out, was the easy part.

It was the blink of an eye, really, that took her from limping across that platform high on the Citadel to a hospital bed on a salarian ship turned hospital docked down in the suburbs of Munich. Well, most of her had made it there. The important parts.

Death made things simple in a sense: you do what you have to because there’s no other choice. They said the best soldiers went to war knowing their life was forfeit. Kill or be killed. Survive or don’t. A simple choice, really.

The consequences would be dealt with later or maybe not at all if you didn’t make it to the end.

And Shepard… she’d already died once anyway. What was it a second time? Maybe after her heart stopped there’d be a dreadnought somewhere in the future emblazoned with the name _Shepard_ if there was anyone left at all.

Surviving was easy. Everything that came after it was hard.

 

  
She was debriefed from her bed on the things she’d missed while she’d been kept asleep, healing. The reapers: remained, but lifeless. Death tolls: abso-fucking-lutely staggering. The living: beaten, bloody, but with a remarkable amount of hope. And her crew: there’d been nothing from them since they’d jumped into a relay just as she’d made her fated choice. Radio silence. No distress calls. Not so much as a ping off a satellite. The relays though, they were restoring their functionality slowly, and maybe then they’d know more.

Hackett had met with her personally to deliver the news, but he’d had ulterior motives, of course. Weeks, she’d spent in that hospital bed reciting the details of what had happened since she’d rushed that beam back in London. Once more, they always said, from the beginning. Let’s hear it again.

They were looking for inconsistencies, she knew, to see if her story changed. What was more, they were looking to see if the same Shepard that had gone up was the same one that had come down. She wondered what they would do if she said just the wrong thing one time: would there be a gun to her head in a moment’s notice? A quick end to the indoctrination before they had another Saren on their hands? Or would it be a life destined for research and study six levels below the Earth’s surface? Would today be the last day she felt the sun on her face, albeit only through a window, if they deemed her _wrong_?

She was never alone in that room, not with the cameras in corners and the mirrored wall she knew kept prying eyes behind it. Always watching, always looking, even when a nurse came to help her bathe. When night came and the room’s lights automatically dimmed down, it was then that Shepard would roll to her side, face buried into the pillow and let the tears come. Tears for the frustration she felt at being kept like a lab rat in that room. Tears for Anderson who had always been in her corner. Tears for the loneliness that permeated through her. Tears for the men and women of the Normandy that every day seemed further and further from being found alive. Tears for Garrus—the betrayal on his face when she’d sent him back onto the ship at the last moment. Had she sent him to his death?

It was a prison there, worse than the facade of one she’d been kept in back in Vancouver. She’d had armed guard on her at all times before, like they always expected her to make a break for it given her past. Now… while she was sure there was a guard somewhere beyond those doors she never passed beyond, it was only nurses and physicians and Alliance that came to see her. It was, as expected, very easy to keep a prisoner who couldn’t even get out of bed.

Shepard had been their only hope once upon a time, and now they looked on her with all the fear of a fly on the last day of it’s already short life cycle. There was more, too. Pity. There was always pity on their faces.

Some days she raged against it much like a child would, throwing her half eaten dish back at the same person sent to collect it, screaming and yelling to elicit _something_. Anything. It never came, however, and though it burned inside her to do, she was often left trying the opposite to curry favor.

“Please,” she implored Hackett, gripping his hand tightly with the only complete one she had left. His visits had become increasingly rare, she had to act on it when she had the chance. “Tell me you’ve heard something from the Normandy.”

He was even more inhuman than his hologram, like he wasn’t the person she remembered at all. They hadn’t been friends—not like she and Anderson had been—but he’d respected her at one time, hadn’t he? Or perhaps it had all been a ruse, a means to an end, a way to get what the Alliance needed.

Steven did not return the squeeze of her hand. “We’ve heard nothing,” he repeated, the same statement every time.

“Let me,” and tears wet her eyes, she wasn’t sure if they were real or fake anymore, “I don’t need much. Just a ship—anything you can spare—and I’ll find my own crew or use whoever you want me to. Let me look for them.”

There were no words at first, just the motion of his eyes leaving hers to glance along the length of her form in bed. It said enough.

“I know I’m not…” Shepard released his hand, she couldn’t bare to touch another human being anymore, especially not one so obviously disconnected from her. “Please. I’ve been here for… weeks…” She rubbed her forehead, shaking her head. Time had blurred. “Months? There’s not enough food. Someone has to find them or they’re going to starve.”

“I assure you that every ship—“

“ _Bullshit_.”

Hackett moved to stand, his usual signal their conversations had come to a close. She sat up sharply in bed, ignoring the aches and pains. “When will you decide I’ve told you the truth? When will it be enough? Never?” Shepard ripped the sheet and blanket from the bed, exposing the rest of her body that wasn’t cloaked in the ill fitting hospital gown, so he could no longer avoid her new reality. No doubt he knew her injuries, had read files on her health, but had he seen it? Had he looked her over and seen what pieces she’d been missing when she’d come back? “I’ve given you my fucking life, my body. What more can you want from me?”

Shepard shifted in the bed, using mostly what little strength she had in her arms. It was a trial to try to swing her left leg, the fixator in place, and then used her hands—down two digits and all—to move what remained of the right. A traumatic amputation had taken it from above the knee. There hadn’t been a plan to what she was to do once she felt her bare foot touch the ground, but she pushed on anyway, however ill prepared she was. The pain screamed at her though it was the heavy weight of her body that was worse, like she wasn’t on Earth but some alien planet where the gravity was three fold what she was used to.

She stumbled, catching herself on his vacant chair. It only worked to slow her fall to the floor.

“Let me go,” she pleaded again, swallowing down every shriek of pain. “Does anyone even know I’m alive?”

Hackett left, and Shepard let herself fully collapse in a heap to the floor. She beat a hand into the cold surface, gasping for breath that never felt like it reached her lungs. When the staff came back in, she didn’t fight.  
  
Three days later, more progress had been made with her medical care than all the days before since she’d woken up. That external fixator on her leg had been removed without so much as a word. It only confirmed the thoughts she’d had long ago, that her progress had been delayed in favor of keeping her submissive.

They had her on crutches immediately afterward, and though it was like she was a newborn foal trying to make sense of her limbs for the first time, she managed. A prosthetic was fitted to her right leg, an older rudimentary model of the likes she’d seen in old vids but never in person. It was clunky and didn’t move at all how her leg had, but it brought her back to standing on her own.

She hadn’t stood like that on her own since… Shepard crossed her arm over her abdomen, mimicking the guarding motion she’d done over her stomach wound when she’d last limped across that platform on the Citadel, certain she was meant to die there.

Her head spun, a dizziness overtaking her, but Shepard grabbed the edge of the steel sink to stay upright.

That woman in the mirror… it took her a moment to even understand that it was her own reflection staring back at her. She touched a cheek like perhaps what she felt wouldn’t reflect the image, but it was just as she saw.

“Commander Shepard.”

She turned her head back to the opened door of the bathroom before moving through it, taking the cane they’d given her to prevent any falls.

A soldier, some soldier she’d never met before, stood before her with envelope in hand.

“Commander Shepard,” he went on, like she was to be expecting his presence. “Admiral Hackett instructed this to be given to you.” The soldier offered her the sealed parcel and she took it, though it was a tough thing to balance with her good hand already occupied with the cane. “The crew of the SSV Lisbon will be waiting for you at 0800 hours, two days hence.”

She took a seat on the edge of the hospital bed when she felt herself swaying. The soldier took his leave, stopping just shy of the door to raise his arm in a stiff salute. Shepard returned it with the same amount of vigor.

  
  
The SSV Lisbon was an older frigate class starship, far smaller than even the first Normandy had been. There was a skeleton crew operating the vessel, and from what she’d learned on the third night aboard, each and everyone had volunteered for the job. She’d nearly frozen up at the revelation that there were still people willing to join up on her name alone. Commander Shepard: it still had weight to it, even if the person was a little less impressive than she may have once been.

They were an all human group, assembled piecemeal from different ships and divisions with varying degrees of experience. Their pilot, a woman of age with Shepard called Anna Cantor, had been from Shepard’s home world long ago, on the opposite face safe and sound while Shepard’s family had been torn apart and killed. A young soldier from Earth’s South Pacific named Aleki reminded her of Vega. Ines Nilsson, a civilian belonging formerly to a research vessel played the role of engineer for the SSV Lisbon, though she promised she knew the design of the ship’s drive core like the back of her hand. A few more filled out the rest of the ship’s crew, just enough to keep her running.

Shepard didn’t care. She’d have taken anyone so long as they were willing. The question of where their loyalties lie, to her or the Alliance, went unasked. She’d long ago gotten used to operating on a ship where even whispers couldn’t be trusted. The mission, though, that came first.

While there were private quarters afforded to her as acting captain of the ship, Shepard instead preferred to bunk down with the rest of her crew in the main sleeping quarters that were mostly empty as it was. It was for transparency’s sake, she told herself, but in truth it was the isolation of the room that scared her more than anything. Alone, it was easy to have an idle mind that wandered to the worst of her thoughts.

So she kept quarters alongside everyone else, even taking on breakfast or dinner duties when she rotated through the informal schedule. A cook hadn’t been one of the few that had come along for the ride, so they would have to make do given the circumstances. It was an interesting task, her still not sure on her feet—or foot, really—trying to manage pots and pans around the galley kitchen. Shepard was learning, though, and that was what mattered.

Along with the use of the SSV Lisbon, Hackett had gifted Shepard with a data dump of information regarding their own search for the SR-2. She’d been shocked, to say the least, and slightly humbled, to find out there truly had been a small search effort ongoing for her crew. It probably hadn’t entirely been altruistic, but that fact was irrelevant. Regardless, she had poured over the data on the first few days, longing for EDI or even a geth—she’d wanted to bring one along, had even asked, only to find out they’d all gone dark—who could have analyzed and come to conclusions in an instant of what she was looking at. It would have to be the old fashioned way, though. Her eyes burned from the strain of staring at the computer screen.

It had mostly been nonsensical, likely due to some unmentionable Alliance information that needed to be scrubbed out before it reached her hands. What she did glean from it, however, was that there hadn’t been a single ping off the Normandy’s public signature from anywhere in the Sol system, nor any off the few ships that had begun traveling through the few open relays. There had also been no distress call logged or heard, and no message logged on the other side of the relay indicating they’d been there at all.

That didn’t surprise her.

What she did know was that sometime when she’d been up among the rotting stench of bodies on the Citadel, sometime between _the end_ and when she’d seen the Illusive Man put a bullet in his own brain, there’d been an evacuation order. The Normandy had acknowledged and taken action, only just making the Charon Relay before the so called blast she’d heard so much about had taken place. The SR-2 lost any connection 0.72 seconds later.

Where had they gone? Which relay had they hoped to reach? Had they simply been vaporized due to a moment of bad timing?

The process of their search was simultaneously methodical and chaotic. The plan was to jump to each currently functioning relay, ears open for distress calls and scanning planets. Any ships they came across within a few light years and willing to talk would be given the Normandy’s public identifiers as well as the unique signature associated with it’s drive core and the exact amount of eezo she knew had been aboard the ship at time of it’s crash. The eezo could belong to whomever found it first, she promised various militaries and pirates alike, so long as the crew was kept safe and unharmed.

She’d had hope on that first trip. They’d find them right away, Shepard told herself. It would be easy only if you knew what to look for and the Alliance hadn’t given away enough information for passersby to pick the Normandy out of all the other space trash. The second time, she feigned the same assurance she’d had earlier even if she was shaken inside. They would find them. Of course they would.

Three Earth weeks later and they’d found nothing. Not even a streak of eezo particles swirling through space where the Normandy may or may not have been turned to dust. Not a single ship had even passed along a false positive. Nothing. Not a fucking thing.

She was used to rising with the rest of the crew who hadn’t worked through the night cycle, but Shepard remained abed, curtain closing her into the coffin like bunk she kept for herself. Her omni-tool clicked on and Shepard instinctively scrolled through it, looking for something she knew wasn’t there. Her old one had never been found and was likely destroyed, floating somewhere through space. There’d been backups of all the data she kept, only those backups had been safe and secure on the Normandy. Nothing of her life over the last few years remained now: no photos, messages, clearance codes to doors all over the Milky Way. No middle of the night vids forwarded from Joker when he couldn’t get to sleep; no Cerberus intel from the Liara via Glyph; no messages from Garrus detailing just what he planned on starting and finishing when they were next alone again.

That emptiness ached in her somewhere deep, and there were moments in the midst of the worst bouts of grief when Shepard wondered if it was possible any of it had even happened. The mind was a powerful thing, after all.

“Please,” she said aloud at a whisper, eyes clenched tight, “let today be the day.” Surviving was easy. Living with the aftermath was hard.

After dinner that night, their enterprising pilot cum bootlegger had presented her with a bottle—the first of many she’d promised—of hooch crafted in the empty med bay. Shepard drowned herself in it, welcoming the burn that warmed her body all the way through with each swallow. She never drank except on shore leave, but that had been before when being a Commander meant something and she’d had a loyal crew following her to the far reaches of the galaxy. This crew now… they weren’t her own. Not really. Shepard drank another finger’s width down from her glass.

“Shepard,” Anna started, “perhaps we should think of returning to Earth.”

She shook her head. “If you want to leave, I won’t hold you here.”

“It’s not any that of us that don’t want to be here… but you’re unwell. You should go back to Earth, take some time, and let us continue the search for you.”

“I’m fine—getting better every day,” and as if it would somehow demonstrate her health, she knocked her knuckles on the table top. Shepard flexed her hand and fingers as if she could still feel the ring and pinky fingers that were absent.

Anna sighed, long and deep, sinking into her chair. She’d hardly touched her drink, the same booze she’d seemed so proud of half an hour before.

“Do you remember the smell of home?” Anna asked. They’d talked of that planet before, of growing up as farmers’ daughters on Mindoir.

Shepard hummed, lazily nodding. “Like dirt and rain and…”

“Iron.”

Her nose wrinkled. “Blood.” Another drink. “Almost twenty years later and here we are… a couple of farm girls seeing the universe together.”

“If my parents could see me now.”

“My father would’ve disowned me. He had a brother that died in the First Contact war and never forgave the Alliance for it.” Her eyebrows quirked, a reserved smile on her lips. “Never forgave the Turians for it either, so if the military service part didn’t anger him enough, certainly my fraternization with one would’ve done the job.”

“So it was true,” Anna said, leaning over to refill Shepard’s glass and top off her own with just a splash. “You and him.”

It seemed a strange thought that someone might not know about her and Garrus, but then again she had been long used to only interacting with such a tight knit group aboard the Normandy. It was hard to keep secrets there, not that she’d ever tried very hard.

“Yes,” the word was soft, her throat suddenly dry. “I loved him very much.”

“Love,” Anna corrected. “You love him very much.”

Their eyes met and Shepard knew her companion felt her own silent thank you. Yes. Love. As in present, current, unending. As in there was more to be felt, more to be explored. As in the book had only just begun to be written. As in they would find him. Alive.

Anna inched her chair in closer to Shepard’s, making the conversation feel more intimate despite the surroundings of the empty mess hall. “What did you love most about him?”

It was girl talk, the kind that she’d dreamt of having some day when she was fourteen thinking of the future and who she’d like to be her first kiss.

Shepard idly ran a finger tip across her lower lip, the ghost of a turian’s mouth haunting her. “His trust. I’ve never questioned his loyalty.”

Anna smiled and laughed. “We’re both over thirty, I don’t need the family friendly answer.”

It caused her to smile too. The alcohol, the questions—Shepard didn’t care if it had been planned in a shallow attempt at drawing her out. It was working and she let it. “The sex, then.” Her cheeks were flushed with blood, skin hot. “It was so good that I cried in the middle of it once. Just couldn’t stop.”

“The sign of a good man.”

“The best.” Shepard knuckled the corners of her eyes, smearing tears across her cheek bones. “He was hurt… when they left. That’s why I sent him back—to protect him.”

“You did what you thought was best,” Anna reassured. “No one knew what was going to happen.”

“I.. I know. But what if we find them and it turns out he’s been dead this whole time? I was asleep and he’s—“

Anna folded her hand over Shepard’s forearm, grasping it tightly. “Then you’ll deal with that if it comes. Not now.”

It was unseemly, her behavior. It wasn’t the kind that belonged to ship captains, commanders, Spectres, soldiers. She hadn’t let tears slide down her cheeks, coughing back mucus while wallowing in her own pity back on Torfan. If she had, she’d have been another name to that long list of casualties back then.

“Do you have family?” Shepard asked, but the tight, flattened smile that Anna gave her told her enough.

“I had a husband, but he passed away. Before all of this,” she added, answering an unspoken question. “He was sick for a couple years.”

It was a sobering thought to be reminded of life before the Reapers. “I’m sorry.”

Anna raised a hand dismissively and stood. She downed the rest of her glass in a single gulp and took the half empty bottle back in her arms, presumably for safe keeping. “Deal with it _if_ it happens.”

Her words felt more a warning than anything else: don’t follow me down a rabbit hole I’ve already seen.

 

Despite the hangover, Shepard felt renewed come morning. Call it hope, determination, even foolishness… it didn’t matter what it was.

Shepard sat in the cockpit while Anna was at the helm and engineer Nilsson lingered nearby. Her omni-tool projected a small map of the galaxy between them.

“We’ve been through every relay as they’ve come online,” she said, touching a finger to the hologram, illuminating each cluster and it’s relay. “We’ve searched each one and there’s been nothing, not even scrap metal belonging to the Normandy. No transmissions, no beacons.”

“They only have a certain range,” Ines said.

Anna nodded, “but we’ve been to the heart of each cluster and,” she manipulated Shepard’s map, zooming in on a random one. Anna circled her finger surrounding the perimeter of it. “That should’ve been enough to pick up something from any of these planets. They would’ve jumped in through the relay and either crashed on the first planet they hit, or been badly damaged and had to take refuge on one that looked habitable. If they were still in working order, we would’ve heard from them by now, which means they’ve been incapacitated in some way. They wouldn’t have gone far. Hey—hold on to something, we’re about to jump back through to Sol.”

Shepard was too used to that feeling by now, a sensation unlike any other that had turned her stomach the first few times. It wasn’t unlike the time between the Citadel and that hospital room. It all seemed to pass in an instant, even if it hadn’t truly been.

The control panel chirped as soon as they landed, so to speak, ship identifiers transmitting and receiving, welcoming them back home. An instant.

“How long does it take to make that jump?” Shepard suddenly asked.

Anna rolled a shoulder in a shrug. “A couple seconds in theory—but with the way it works, we don’t feel it on our end.”

“Exactly how long? Is there some way to know?”

Her pilot twisted a dial and numbers poured onto a separate screen. “Comparing the time we registered from one beacon to the next… 3.938 seconds.”

Shepard could feel the moment her heart began to pound, could even feel the quickening of her pulse. “Ines—when you were working, you said your team were in the outer reaches of the Hourglass nebula, correct?” She brought up the cluster in question, watched the planets spin about their star slowly.

“It’s difficult,” she replied but gave an affirmative bob of her head, “because you run the risk of burning out your FTL if you’re not sure where you’re going, not to mention the time it takes to do so.”

“But it’s not just… I mean, there’s space out there. Just not empty space.”

“Of course. They still make discoveries every day—not as in land on a planet or an asteroid and plant your flag on it, but we can often tell there’s something there before we see it because of the way gravity reacts. That’s been good enough to name and claim a planet for the last hundred and fifty years. It’s as good as seeing it with our own eyes.”

“And every time we pass through a relay, there’s a record of it—isn’t there?”

Anna eased the Lisbon into a gradual slow down out of FTL, then turned her attention back to Shepard as the autopilot kicked on. “Unless you’re stealth, but even then, there’s a record of it if you dig hard enough, just nothing to identify the ship. Your Normandy, though, it wasn’t in stealth when it entered. All the data we’ve seen shows it very clearly passing through the Charon relay.”

“But not,” Shepard emphasized, “coming out the other side. There’s no record of that.”

It had been the most damning of the evidence that implied the Normandy had either simply disappeared, or more likely, been vaporized into oblivion.

“What happens if the relay network goes offline while you’re inside it?” Shepard posed the question and was only met with silence from her crew. “Maybe,” and Shepard threw her hands up, exasperated, “you slip into some alternate dimension. Maybe you cease to exist at all. Or maybe,” she drew the map up once again, focusing the screen in the space between two adjacent clusters, “you get dumped out somewhere in between. Wherever 0.72 seconds of travel time leaves you.”

“I’m not sure there’s any evidence to support that theory…” Ines apprehensively said.

Anna joined in. “Besides, it would take us years at FTL, if it was possible at all, trying to get to wherever they are, and that’s if we even figure out between which relays they were traveling. Plus, it’s not like they’re just going to allow us to kill the power on the relays again…”

Shepard had made up her mind before Anna even stopped speaking, and headed for the doorway.  “We’re going to Earth, anyone who wants to get off the ship can, both of you included.”

 

Their ship was minus a few beating hearts when they left Earth once again, supplies restocked in their places. Hackett had sent word he wanted to see her when they pinged back on Alliance radar, and though she had sent a message in the affirmative, Shepard had no intentions of making good on it. They were like thieves in the night, only planet side long enough to make the exchanges of bodies and goods.

There was another stop, though, this one to dock with a quarian ship still lingering in their system. Shepard called in a favor, and there she took in a geth, only very newly restored to online capabilities. It had volunteered, they told her, _For Shepard Commander we will do anything_.

She’d been fortunate that Anna and Ines hadn’t left her back on Earth, for although she knew the geth would be able to pilot the ship without issue, there was another task she had in mind for it.

“Exodus cluster,” Shepard said finally, while the crew waited for her final word. “The ship that jumped before the Normandy went to the Exodus cluster. They would’ve followed.” It wasn’t much to go off of, but it was better than anything else they’d had before.

If the relay didn’t kill them, Shepard was sure the acid in her stomach would soon burn a hole through her esophagus. She’d tried eating to dampen it down, but her body had rejected the offering, leaving Shepard emptying her guts into a toilet for half an hour that morning. That taste of vomit wouldn’t leave no matter how hard she brushed.

She’d hardly slept the night before, her dreams so real she swore she could even smell the decaying corpses she’d trudged through back on the Citadel. Garrus had come to her in another, told her to stop looking before she got herself or her crew killed in the process. There’d been no sleeping after that, not because she didn’t need it, but because she didn’t trust her mind not to lead her astray.

“Is it going to work?” She asked the geth unit.

“Our calculations indicate it will. We are networked and waiting for orders at the Exodus relay.”

Shepard touched a hand to it’s shoulder. “Thank you.”

“You are welcome, Shepard Commander.”

On the bridge, Shepard gave the command and the SSV Lisbon, seven souls and one member of the geth collective on board, entered the Charon relay bound for the Exodus cluster. 0.72 seconds later, their destination lost and restored power for a fraction of a second. The SSV Lisbon never made it out the other side.

“Well,” Shepard was the first to speak, “we’re not dead. So there’s that.”

“Listen,” Anna said, pulling off her headset as she hit a button on her console. The sound from the headset flooded the cockpit.

_“—Is the SSV Normandy of the Systems Alliance—“_

 

  
The distress call led them to a nearby planet only a few light years off. It was green and it was blue and when they spotted the Normandy from the atmosphere Shepard once again knew what genuine hope felt like. The ship was battered and broken, but she was mostly whole, just like Shepard.

Anna set the Lisbon down in the nearest clearing, half a klick off the Normandy’s crash site. They hadn’t a shuttle on board the Lisbon—that thing had been lost in the battle on Earth—so they’d proceeded on foot. The armor she wore didn’t fit well, too loose in some areas, too tight in others, and forget about the prosthetic—it felt even less life like than she thought was already possible, especially over the rough terrain.

From their descent in the atmosphere, the Normandy hadn’t looked so damaged. It had fostered the greatest happiness in her when they’d spotted it, but up close it was quite the opposite. It was derelict and dark, and even from outside the ship she could tell it was uninhabited. The side door was left permanently open, only darkness within.

Her fingers grappled with the edge of the doorway, trying to pull herself up with the real use of one leg. She managed to only get a knee on the platform, dragging her body the rest of the way up. Shepard turned her light on, illuminating a path.

“You shouldn’t—“ Aleki called after her from the ground, “This thing doesn’t look stable, Commander.” An audible groan and creak from the ship punctuated his words.

Shepard placed a hand on the wall of her ship, like one would do to calm a varren. “Where are they, girl? Give me an answer.”

The damage to the outside of the ship translated to the inside as well, a strong indication of what it would’ve been like for her crew during the crash. For a moment she swore she could feel the simultaneous burn of fire and cold of space aboard the SR-1.

_This isn’t Alchera_ , she told herself. _This ship isn’t a tomb_.

Ultimately, Shepard knew she would be limited to the second deck because of the nonfunctioning elevator, although in better shape, Shepard wouldn’t have hesitated to make her way down that elevator shaft or one of the other small emergency ladders between floors. What she was able to glean, however, was just how bare the ship was. It had been stripped of everything that wasn’t nailed down.

The cockpit itself was just as dark as everywhere else, save for the dim glow of a single light coming from a console on the floor. The distress beacon. It was the only thing drawing power anymore.

“You made it. You called for help,” she spoke to herself, on her return trip back towards the doorway that was the only light source. “And where did you go?”

Her team was there to help her back down this time, and she gladly took the offering. “It’s been empty for awhile,” she said the obvious, then clicked on her comm with the Lisbon. “Anna, look back over the scan of the crash site from orbit, see if you can find anything that would be out of place on this planet.”

“Already on it, Shepard.”

The Normandy’s crash had been fortuitous—well, it hadn’t been in the sense that they’d crashed at all—but if they’d come to a stop only a second or two slower, the ship would’ve tipped over down the cliffside it was perched upon. Had that happened, she had no doubt they’d be walking into a very different scene, one that meant the Normandy had gone from starship to state of the art mass grave.

She and her small groundside crew of two spread out in their search for clues. While the others went towards the expanse of forest behind them, Shepard found herself drawn to the cliff face and vantage point over the lower land. Directly in front of the Normandy, it made a straight drop, but a little further from the port side it was more of a gradual step down. Shepard headed for a large tree, stopping when she spotted the muddied ground. The dirt was disturbed and grass trampled upon, going brown with death instead of bright green, an artificial pathway carved out from constant foot traffic alone.

The thin strip of a dirt continued down the hill, scuffs of mud over craggy rocks that interrupted the pathway.

“Over here!” She shouted, but didn’t wait, however ill advised it was. Shepard took it with a little too much speed, that once familiar pulse of adrenaline spreading throughout every inch of her body and urging her along. She tripped and slid and skidded, sometimes even on the seat of her armor before picking herself up as quick as she could, catching herself against tree branches to brace herself from any severe falls.

The sound of flowing water grew as she moved downward. Water, yes. Establish a source of clean water—that was one of the first things you needed to do when trying to survive in the elements. They’d go to water.

Finally on flat terrain, she followed that sound until she encountered something wider than just a stream, but nothing quite so large to be called a river, and began walking along the shore, against the flow. Better to be upstream.

“I’ve got nothing on scan, Shepard,” Anna’s voice piped in, “canopy of the jungle is keeping everything concealed. And slow down—your heart rate is through the roof.”

There was no energy to be spared in answering, though she knew Anna was right. The air was breathable, they’d known that much before even landing, but it felt thin—like operating at higher altitudes. That, plus her obvious non-tip-top-shape added up and Shepard had never felt more tired in her life. Except, maybe, on the Citadel with a fifth of her blood spilled out behind her.

It wasn’t just that, however. It was the panic of the moment, of coming so far and so close to find them and knowing maybe she was just _too late_. Was there enough to eat? Was there something on this planet they weren’t vaccinated against that had caught them off guard? Had there been injuries too severe to overcome without Chakwas on board? Had she walked over their graves and not even noticed?

She could feel the fear in her throat, nearly choking on it. When they were searching the galaxy, when she was in that hospital… there was always hope, and now she was to face the truth.

The first sign was lost on her at first, a sound slipping through one ear and out the other, buried among the rustling of leaves and chirp of whatever animal lived in the terrain around her. She heard it once, twice, a third time, before she stopped, absolutely still, and just _listened_. There it was again. The whip of fabric in the wind. She’d heard it in flags hanging at full height and half mast on Earth, heard it in soldier’s tented barracks on countless planets throughout the Milky Way, heard it in the clothes hanging on the line to dry on Mindoir. A familiar sound, but not one that nature produced on it’s own.

Shepard followed it around a bend in the stream, her boots wet from the water lapping at the shore, and that was when she saw it: a canopy between trees and metal supports marking the closest structure, and more beyond that, carved up against a rock wall for protection.

A body moved amongst the backdrop of the home they’d built, leaner than she remembered, but she wouldn’t forget those tattoos so long as she lived. Shepard tried to speak but it was as if all that breath had left her lungs.

“James,” she said, not nearly loud enough, then stifled a cry, choked back a sob of relief.  “James!”

He looked up instantly, directly at her, and even all that distance away, she knew he recognized her too, and the relief she wore was mimicked on him.

“Shepard!”

Though she wanted to touch him, to put her hands on him and feel him real and not a hologram, a dream, a nightmare, the sight of him was enough to cause Shepard to drop to her knees in the mud. She could die now, she was sure. She could die now and be happy knowing they were safe.

For once, the tears she’d shed with increasing frequency as of late hadn’t been born of sadness or frustration, but of joy. Shepard didn’t move to wipe them away, every drop she lost felt like a weight lifting off her, setting her free.

She hadn’t heard James running to her, or the other foot steps that followed behind him, only felt him crash into her, taking her body into his arms and squeezing her with a familiar tightness she wasn’t sure she’d ever feel again. Shepard fought to hug him back with the same fervor he had, but her grasp was nothing compared to his, so she settled into his hold, felt his own tears against her neck. She’d never seen Vega cry.

“You came,” he said, then, “You’re alive.”

“Yes,” she replied, fingers digging into his back. “So are you.”

He pulled back when the others reached them, and through her blurry eyes she spotted Liara, Kaidan. Vega helped her to her feet, handling her like she was nothing at all and then offered her a steady support until Liara took over, embracing Shepard.

“Goddess, we never thought we’d see you—or anyone—ever again.”

Shepard smiled through the tears, and pulled off her gloves, discarding them on the ground, to set a hand to her old friend’s cheek. She didn’t have the words.

Kaidan took his turn just like the rest, holding her closer and longer than he ever had since before she’d died. “You smell like shit,” she teased, but it was a bit of a lie, somehow he still smelled exactly how she recalled from all those nights they’d spent alone together.

“I do,” he laughed, loud and boisterous, the kind she wasn’t used to him and his usually so reserved nature.

He slid an arm around her, under her arm, and helped her without question, back towards their campsite. It was Joker, as usual, picking up the rear. Shepard let Kaidan go for only a few steps to approach Jeff on her own, her gait almost as bad as his.

“Jesus, you’re worse than I am,” he said, in typical Joker fashion. No hello, no thanks. Somehow, it felt right.

“You have no idea,” she answered, taking him in her arms. He tensed at first, then relaxed into it and she felt his hands at her back, returning the hug. This had never been their thing—true affection of any kind. They’d been more playful banter, sarcastic digs, to show they cared. “Thank you,” she whispered. “For keeping everyone safe.” Shepard let him go.

“Not everyone,” he said with a shake of his head. “Javik took off the first week and EDI, she’s…”

Javik… well, she’d always assumed he would do something like that. Hadn’t he told her once that after the reapers, he’d be on his way? Wherever that would be. The last of his kind, that wasn’t something she wanted to imagine.

“EDI—did she go out during the crash?”

Joker’s brow furrowed, a question there.

“The geth went dark with the reapers, but the quarians have gotten most of them back online. The relays, too.”

She had hoped those words would inspire optimism in him, but she knew Jeff well enough to know the downturned corners of his mouth meant doubt. “We’ll… we’ll take her body along with the archives from the Normandy. She’ll be back. She will.” Shepard didn’t know if she believed her words either, but she would try to, at least.

Jeff gave her the satisfaction of a nod.

Movement caught her peripheral vision, and she turned her head towards it, expecting to see that final missing piece, but it was just the whipping of fabric once again, caught in the wind. Shepard looked beyond Joker, back towards the shantytown crafted of Normandy parts. Nothing stirred.

Behind her, she heard the sound of boots on dirt, her two other crew members catching up to the group, their quiet hellos given and words exchanged.

Shepard looked to Joker, eyes wide, her pulse quickening. She turned back to the rest of them, and where there’d been a comfort there before, Shepard now saw worry.

“Where is he?” She demanded, mouth tight.

“Shepard…” Liara started, hands held out in a placating gesture.

“Where is he?” Shepard repeated again.

It was Kaidan who stepped into the dragon’s den, his words spoken like a true officer with fact rather than emotion. She hated and loved him for it. “We haven’t seen Garrus in four days. He was supposed to be back today, but we're still waiting.”

“And you let him go alone?” Her words were biting, accusing.

“He would never entertain the thought of a companion,” Liara spoke, “Goddess knows we tried to convince him.”

Her head shook, grinding her teeth. “Four days. After all this—I’m four days late. Four fucking days. He could be anywhere—slipped down a canyon, attacked by an animal, injured and left for dead—and I’m four days too late. Aleki, Carina,” she looked back to her two new crew members, suited up and waiting, “Let’s get going before it gets dark.”

“Shepard—you can’t possibly—you’re barely standing as it is,” Liara tried to reason with her, and Shepard’s stumbling step only further fueled the flame. The asari caught her, but Shepard pushed her off.

“Don’t.”

She didn’t truly know how she’d spend another hour, let alone a day, climbing through the unknown of the jungle trying to find trace of him. Her head spun as it was, her joints aching, and the skin was already near rubbed raw where her prosthetic leg attached.

“He knows these forests better than any of us,” Vega piped in, and took Shepard under the arm again. She didn’t fight. “Garrus will come back. He will. This isn’t the first time he’s come back late.”

Kaidan took hold of her at her other side, and she let them lead her slowly back towards their makeshift home and set her down on a crate turned into something of a bench. Shepard buried her head in her hands, elbows to her knees. She felt helpless again, like she’d been back in that hospital room. A caged animal without a cage, kept prisoner by her own body.

Liara brought her a cup of water, pushed it into her hands. “We rigged a purifier from the ship to work on the water down here when it was clear this was going to be an extended stay,” she supplied, guiding it to Shepard’s mouth, even tipped it until she was forced to drink.

She swallowed a few sips, nudging Liara’s hands away. “Help me get this off,” she asked, rolling her shoulders. James stepped up behind her as he’d done a hundred times before, pulling at each release until each arm and the chest plates released. He stacked them on the floor beside her.

“What happened to you?” Kaidan asked, even though she knew the same question was on all their minds with the way their eyes followed the shape of her.

Like them, she’d lost fat and muscle mass, only she hadn’t been stuck on a desert island eating rations and god knows what else. Shepard clicked each fastener on the remaining armor of her lower half, not as careful as Vega had been as she tossed it piece by piece until she was down to just her undersuit. It was cut off at the right knee, a hack job she’d done with a knife, leaving the prosthetic exposed. She felt lighter, free.

“What happened to _you_?” She countered, the question reflected back at all of them, before they could point out the obvious.

Liara’s eyes lingered on her hand on her false knee, the missing fingers there. Jeff answered for the group.

“We received the evacuation order and tried to leave the system. We barely made it to the relay before whatever was released from the Citadel caught up to us… but we didn’t come out where we were supposed to. I don’t… I don’t know what happened, honestly. Came in hot, coasted on momentum only, and this is where we ended up.”

“Joker saved our lives,” Liara added, and the rest of the group added hums of affirmation.

Already around them, the planet was beginning to transition from day to night. Vega added kindling to the fire that had been burning, renewing it. Shepard nodded, taking in the story. It aligned, mostly, with what they knew and what they’d guessed along the way.

“The reapers?” Kaidan inquired. “You said they… went out? Are they gone? Or just asleep?”

“Dead. Destroyed. Done. As far as anyone can tell, I guess.”

“You did it,” Vega said with a satisfied smile. “You really fucking did it.”

It made the corner of her mouth quirk in her own subdued grin. “We did. Yeah, we did.” A moment of pride swelled in her chest. “You guys should start heading back up to our ship—unless you know of a big enough clearing for it to come down here.”

“Not that I’m not eager to take an actual shower… “ Vega started. “But I can safely say we’re all in agreement we’re not going anywhere unless you’re going with us. And since Garrus isn’t here yet…”

“Speak for yourself,” Jeff jested for only a moment, then adopted a more serious tone. “We’re staying.”

Liara nodded. “Yes, he’ll know we’re worried. He’ll be back soon.”

Whether they were humoring her or not, Shepard didn’t care. Yes. He would be back soon. She didn’t come this far to leave without him.

“Go,” she said to the two soldiers who had accompanied her this far. “We’ll be okay. Let the rest of the crew know what’s going on and that we’ll venture up come morning.”

There was a moment of hesitation from the two of them, but they were good soldiers and obeyed, bidding their farewells before restarting on the path back to the Lisbon as night continued to fall.

Liara sat beside her, an arm curled around her shoulders. She took Shepard’s damaged hand with her other one, fingers worrying over the place where her last two fingers had once been and now only scar tissue remained.

“Are you alright, Shepard?”

“No,” she answered honestly. “But I’m better now than I’ve been in a long time.” Shepard leaned into Liara, her head against her shoulder. “I’ll be better when Garrus is here.”

Her friend nodded against her scalp, silence between them for a moment. “He’s been grieving you,” she finally said. “When we first crashed here he believed you’d survived the Citadel, but as time went on… he’s not been himself. Not that any of us have been, especially the longer we spent here. But it’s like he woke up one day and had it in his head that because you weren’t here, the only other option was that you were dead. That’s when he stopped letting anyone come along with him when he left camp. He goes out there to hunt, yes, often brings us back something the rest of us can eat, even if he can’t. But mostly he goes out there to grieve because he believes you died. Again.”

She knew what he felt, knew that lonesome feeling better than almost anyone. At night, when the rest of the world turned the lights down and Shepard was on her own, she had grieved him and the rest of her crew as well.

“I should’ve come sooner… I wanted to. I tried, but the Alliance—they—“

“What’d they do?” Kaidan asked.

“They didn’t believe I was… I was me. They were worried I was indoctrinated, kept me in that hospital bed for I don’t even know how long—made me beg and plead with them to look for you, to let me come and try to find you. I wanted to—I tried—I’m sorry.”

Liara rubbed her back, soothing. “It’s not your fault.”

“Fucking Alliance, after all you’ve done,” Vega grumbled.

Kaidan’s silence said enough. The illusion of the Alliance was shattered for him.

“I don’t know what changed… Hackett grew a conscience or took pity on me, I guess. He gave me a ship and an Alliance crew and let me go. We looked for so long. _So_ long.”

“Anderson didn’t go to bat for you?”

They didn’t know. Of course they didn’t know. They didn’t know anything. Shepard shook her head to Kaidan’s question, then was just as frank with him as he’d been with her earlier. Sometimes news like this needed to be straightforward. “Anderson’s dead. Illusive man, too. Both on the Citadel.”

Vega paced. “Fuck.”

“I’m sorry Shepard,” Liara gave her condolences. “But everyone else… our peoples, I mean. Did we all make it?”

“Everyone’s limping through it, but they’re all accounted for, however small. I don’t know many details, I’m sorry.” There had been other things on her mind. People to find, planets to search.

They’d been isolated from the rest of the galaxy, cut off and left to wonder if there was anyone else alive at all or if they’d be the last of their kind. At least when she’d been held captive by the Alliance, Shepard had always known the fate of the worlds even if she hadn’t known that of her crew. The time here, it had aged them, even Liara who had always seemed so ageless given the circumstances.

A trio of moons scattered across the sky as the small nearby sun set on the planet and Shepard slipped from her seat on the cargo container to the sand and dirt below. Shockingly, it wasn’t a situation they’d ever been in before—she and her crew gathered around a fire on some unexplored planet—given the variety of circumstances they’d found themselves in. The Normandy had always been their safe haven, their place to return to no matter where they traveled. She mourned for that ship, the second incarnation of the ship she’d known, but it was the people that had made it mean something to her, not the metal shell or it’s eezo core. These people, these and more scattered across the galaxy now living or dead, were what had made the Normandy special.

Shepard listened mostly as the night went on, hearing them talk of the immediate aftermath of their crash and just how they’d gotten by during these months. This planet had a shorter daily cycle than they were used to and it had made keeping track of time hard for them, not to mention the havoc it wreaked on their circadian rhythms. They told her tales of what they’d discovered of the planet, and it had been very like Liara to keep meticulous record of it all the old fashioned way—pen to paper—given their lack of anything electronic. They’d conserved power from the beginning, but it had become obvious after awhile that they would have to save it only for the necessities.

Liara showed her the notes she’d taken: drawings of plants and creatures, crude analysis of soil and water, even a rough log of their time spent planetside. Shepard let herself sift through it all, reading of the accounts detailed like how James had fallen ill after he’d scratched himself on a thorn of a bush and they’d thought for awhile he wouldn’t make it. He had in the end, though the recovery was slow and long. Garrus’ injuries from Earth had suffered complications as well and the medi-gel had run out long ago. They were surviving on fate alone now.

“Are you hungry?” Kaidan asked her for the second time. She blinked, looking up to him. “No,” she shook her head, “I haven’t had an appetite lately.”

“We’re celebrating,” he continued as if he hadn’t heard her decline, “it’s a veritable feast tonight on all the finest flavors of MREs. We’ve been saving them for an occasion like this.”

Shepard waved him on.

She wandered from the group as they ate, back towards the mouth of a small cave they had based themselves around. A string of lights were rigged to the stone wall, connected to the solar generator she’d seen earlier that also ran the water purification system. It wasn’t much, just simply enough to guide her way and illuminate the contents within. EDI was there, or the mechanical body she’d once inhabited was, laid out like a viewing across the top of one particularly large crate. Shepard ran her fingers over her arm, like that alone would inspire her to come back to life.

“We’ll fix this,” she promised the lifeless form.

There were other goods there, things she knew to belong to each of their crew that they must’ve pulled from the Normandy over time: a couple old fashioned books, clothes folded neatly despite the chaos around them, a carnifex disassembled. She recognized Garrus’ spot with ease and stopped in front of a box, releasing the latches and raising the lid.

Broken armor littered the top of it, small pieces like wrist cuffs and joint stabilizers. Shepard sifted through it, nice and neat as though Garrus was going to walk in on her at any moment and scold her for not being particularly careful. She hoped, in fact. She hoped that was what happened—even looked back to the mouth of the cave just to check, but it was just as empty as it had been, the chatter of her crew outside only barely filtering in.

He had those few personal effects he traveled with down there as well: a photo of his family, an ID card from C-sec, other mementos of his travels. Beneath that Shepard found the frame that had once been in her cabin, only the dog tags that were inside had gone missing. The glass wasn’t broken, it hadn’t been an accident. No, they’d been removed on purpose. Shepard ran her finger tips along the back of the frame where each little latch had been undone and refastened by Garrus at some point. She shut her eyes and sighed.

It was Vega’s foot steps that pulled her out of her thoughts and Shepard slyly tried to wipe at her eyes, her nose, tucking the frame back into the box and closing the top.

“You should get some sleep,” he suggested.

“Does someone keep watch?”

“If you’re asking because you’re volunteering for first shift—No, we stopped that awhile ago. The fire tends to keep the big stuff away at night.”

Once, finding an unexplored planet had excited her. Now, it was a burden. Too many unknowns, too many things trying to kill you one way or another.

“If…”

“When he comes back, we’ll wake you.”

Shepard nodded. She told herself that he would’ve hunkered down somewhere for the night, would finish on foot once daylight broke. She wouldn’t miss him if she just shut her eyes for a few hours.

James left her once again and Shepard took to Garrus’ bed roll, crafted from one the mattresses that had been in the crew’s quarters. She pulled at the blanket, unsurprised to find she knew this one intimately. It had been spread over her bed in her own living quarters. Sleep found her easy that night.

 

 

It was still dark when she woke, but as she made her way back outside, she could tell it was the early hours of whatever counted for morning on this unknown planet. The sun would break soon, it’s red and oranges flooding the sky, but for now it was still all shades and colorings of blue. This was her favorite time of day if she had to make a choice. She wasn’t an early riser by any means, but there was something to an early morning and being up before sunrise. Even more, there was something to making it through a late, endless night, and realizing you’d survived to see the start of a new day.

A light morning rain was just beginning to taper off as she left everyone else’s sleeping forms behind in that cave. There was symbolism to it: a fresh, clean start. They all needed it. They all deserved it.

Shepard set to tending things she should’ve the night before. She rinsed her face with cool water from a basin, then pulled the top of her bodysuit to her waist, leaving her in only the tanktop she’d worn beneath it, and splashed water over her arms in an attempt to cleanse away the sweat. Tending to her leg was last. She hadn’t wanted to last night, not in front of everyone, and so in the privacy she found in the morning light, Shepard ease the sleeve of the prosthetic from her thigh, exposing the amputated end. It was red and irritated, worse than it was even usually, and she knew that she had pushed too hard.

She hissed as she cleaned and redressed the tender flesh as she’d been taught. It would take time, they’d told her, to build up a tolerance. Maybe if she found Miranda she’d have a bag of spare parts from some other top secret clone hidden away somewhere. Shepard snorted to herself at the thought.

“There’s a ship,” a voice said, urgent and out of breath, and Shepard looked up in the direction of it. It came from the riverside, not the cave behind her. Her stomach squeezed tight and the roll of bandage dropped from her fingers to the ground below.

“It’s Alliance. We have to—” Garrus went on as he dropped his rifle and bag without a care.

Shepard knew the moment he saw her, _really_ saw her in the dim light and understood she wasn’t just a mirage. He paused only a moment then made a beeline for her with hardly even a sound made, falling to his knees to wrap his arms around her middle. He buried his face against her breast and took deep, steadying inhalations of air into his lungs.

It was instinct to curl into him, her arms slung over his shoulders, palms against the back of his head to keep him close to her. Shepard rested her head against the top of his fringe, letting the silent tears fall. It was a wonder she had any moisture left in her body at all. Her chest shuddered and his did the same, like they had pulled each other in so tight they’d been made one inseparable entity instead of two. Like if they pulled apart, either would cease to exist.

“Don’t let me go,” he finally breathed against her collarbone as she wept. “Don’t ever let me go again.”

For emphasis, she pulled him in closer, caressing the back of his skull.

“I won’t,” she answered a few seconds later, voice cracking, when she felt capable of speech at all.

He kept a hold on her, their bodies never fully parting, but pulled back so that he could regard her. Shepard pressed both of her hands to either mandible and Garrus mirrored the same to her cheeks. Her dreams and nightmares, they’d never captured the bright blue color to his eyes right. They’d always seemed dull which couldn’t have been further from the truth.

“How are you here?”

There was a complicated answer to that, and some day he would hear all the details. “I came looking for you.”

“How are you alive?”

That… she didn’t have the answer for. “I wasn’t ready to go.”

“Again,” he said with a smile and shortened laugh.

“Again,” she confirmed.

“I stopped…” he looked down because he couldn’t bare to meet her eyes any longer, “…I stopped believing you’d survived.”

“Sometimes I didn’t think I had either.”

Garrus folded his three-fingered hand over her own, that oddly enough, resembled his more now. He felt the damage there, tugging at her hand so he could get a look at it. His brow plates shifted and then his eyes were moving from beyond just her hand to that of her leg. Garrus’ gaze turned sharply back to her.

“I survived,” she reminded him. “I found you.”

He caught her off guard when he leaned up just enough to force his mouth to hers. That action had always been something more human than turian, one that he’d humored her in as they’d grown intimate. It was usually she who initiated the act of pressing his hard plates to her softer lips, but the weight behind that kiss told her this one was for him just as much as her. She’d let herself imagine feeling that again in the darkest hours of night, the quietest moments, like if she hoped too hard and let the world see then it would be stolen from her forever. It almost had.

Shepard let him pull her down from where she sat until she straddled over his lap, the two of them hooked into one another, a mishmash of human and turian limbs. Their lips parted infrequently, only to press their foreheads or cheeks together in order to relearn one another without use of their hands. Her eyes never opened and neither of them spoke, the sense of touch, smell, and taste enough to guide her. Garrus was warm beneath and around her, a pleasant cocoon wrapping her up better than any blanket ever had.

“You sent me away,” Garrus said against her hair. “You sent me away when I could’ve been by your side.”

A soft whimper left the back of her throat. “I was trying to save you.”

“And I’ve always been trying to protect you.”

Truer words were never spoken. He’d been a constant in her life. The others, and she had never been bitter or angry at them for it, had stepped in and out of her life to tend to their own things. That was just the way of the world. Liara had her research and the dealings of being the Shadow Broker. Kaidan had the Alliance, Tali the quarian cause, Wrex the future of Tuchanka. Garrus… he’d returned to Palaven when she’d been locked up, but first sight of her and he’d returned to his place at her side. He’d always been there before she’d had to even ask.

“I won’t do it again.”

There was a satisfied hum, like it was the first time he’d won an argument with her. It brought a lightness to the moment.

He eased his hold and Shepard leaned back just barely against the cargo container behind her, though not vacating the seat she had on his thighs. Between them, they shared a smile, however different they might have looked on human and turian faces. Her cheeks ached—she couldn’t remember the last time she’d smiled like that. Surely it had been when she was looking at him some time ago.

“Reapers? Palaven?”

“Gone,” she answered simply, “and, not gone.”

His relief was most present in the sagging of his shoulders, a sigh easing the tension from him. Garrus nodded.

Shepard slipped her hand into one of his, linking their fingers together, skin to skin.

“There’s so much I want to say to you,” he said.

“We’re going to have the time,” Shepard answered. “It’s going to take us near a year and a half to get back to Sol. I hope you didn’t have any big plans for your birthday.”

“Some rescue you planned. Survive this planet…” he shrugged, still holding that grin, mandibles flaring, “…and starve on the ride home.”

“Garrus, Shepard,” Vega said as a way of greeting as he emerged from the cave, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “We told you he’d turn up.”

“Yes,” and her eyes followed him as he trailed off along the river bank before setting her eyes back on Garrus. “You always come back.”

 

  
It took them two days to leave the planet behind. Despite the urgency they’d all had at one point in escaping that place, there was a considerable amount of dragging of heels when it came to saying goodbye. It had become a home to them, one that she hadn’t gotten to experience, but a place of refuge when they’d needed it most.

Shepard had ordered the Lisbon to survey the continent as they packed, looking for any sign of the prothean that had aided them, but they’d turned up nothing. It was like he’d vanished and left not a trace of his existence. Shepard had a thought that maybe, knowing Javik, it had been by design.

Liara met with Ines back on the Normandy’s carcass and together they’d pulled each piece of server and mainframe they’d thought could hold a key to restoring the AI that had been just as much a friend as any one of them. The Lisbon picked up the pieces there, then relocated down to sea level in a clearing of shore downstream and just big enough for the ship to safely set itself down.

They’d spent the better part of a day dragging any piece of equipment or supplies worthy of making the trip back with them, and packing up personal effects. Shepard, as much as she longed for the relative luxuries of the ship like a hot shower, had stayed on the ground, refusing to leave until everyone was with her. It was a bit of the captain goes down with the ship mentality, the same one she’d had over Alchera when she’d cleared each and every living person from the SR-1, sacrificing herself in the process. The planet wasn’t in any danger of being sucked into some black hole in the following hours, but they were her crew. They were her own. She’d left them once, she wouldn’t make that mistake again.

She was the last onboard, standing on the opened rear bay door, bracing herself as she felt the Lisbon begin lift off. The loud, warning tone sounded around them, reminding her to clear out so the door could be closed.

Shepard hesitated, and in the distance she could take in her final look of the campsite they’d crafted into a home for themselves there. She couldn’t take credit for all the training they’d ever had in their lives—in the grand scheme she’d only been in each of their lives for hardly more than a blink—but she felt pride nonetheless. They’d made it through. They’d survived.

Garrus took her by the hand from a step behind. “Come on,” he said, and pulled Shepard inside and let the door close behind them. “It’s a long way home.”

 


End file.
